1. MEMORANDUM
To: Advitya Khanna
From: Doug Carlson, PhD
Subject: Advitya Khanna Employment Recommendation
Date: 09/19/16
To Whom It May Concern:
I had the great pleasure to work with Advitya over his two Cornell Engineering Co-op terms at
Hillcrest Laboratories, Inc (2015-2016). I was his mentor as he worked in various roles across
the company--primarily within my group, the Embedded Software team.
I can confidently say that Advitya is one of the best and most promising engineers I have had the
pleasure to work with, both in my academic career (B.S. in Computer Science from Duke
University 2004, PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University 2014) and in my
industrial career (three years in web application engineering at Appian and two years in
embedded software at Hillcrest Labs).
Hillcrest Labs is a leading supplier of software for MEMS data processing and sensor fusion.
Historically, our company has provided novel user input solutions using 3-D pointing devices for
Smart Television, and more recently we have used our expertise to advance the state of the art in
power-aware sensor fusion for mobile and wearable devices, augmented/virtual reality displays,
and navigation systems for domestic robots.
Advitya was a valuable asset to the team from his first day. As you interview him, you will
quickly become aware of the breadth and depth of his technical knowledge (though I must say he
has a stronger grasp of embedded software development and debugging than many PhD students
I have worked with). You will also be able to see that he can quickly understand complex
problems and consistently produce elegant and practical solutions. You will also be able to tell
that he is a focused, diligent self-starter. These are the hallmarks of a good engineer, but there are
two traits that Advitya demonstrated that make him a great engineer which are hard to see in an
interview that I’d like to highlight.
First, he frequently sought out feedback and constructive criticism on his work: whether it was in
the structured evaluations from Cornell or in our frequent status meetings, when I asked him if
he had any questions the response was always “what can I do to improve?” He accepted
guidance without ego and was able to act on it effectively. During his first term, for instance, we
identified technical communication (written and oral) as a weak spot. By the end of his second
term, he was holding and facilitating meetings between engineers, support staff, and the senior
VP of Product Strategy. His emails were focused and informative. When he sought assistance, I
had enough background information on whatever he needed help with to work efficiently to
resolve his problems. I cannot express how pleased I was with his growth and improvement in
such a short time.

2. The second trait that Advitya demonstrated was a strong desire to not just “get the job done,” but
to produce bullet-proof solutions that leave behind a better environment for his team and the
larger community. One example of this that comes to mind occurred when Advitya was
developing a software abstraction layer on top of a 3rd
-party implementation of peripheral drivers
for one of our development platforms. This was a complex task involving deep knowledge of
microcontroller development. While he was able to successfully use a unit-test driven
development approach to adapt timer peripherals, GPIO and interrupt configurations, etc, one of
the test cases failed for a situation that was common in our software but not necessarily common
to other applications (an unacknowledged, single-byte I2C transfer). He was able to not only
identify the problem, but he was also able to dig into lightly-documented 3rd
party code, develop
a patch, and submit it back to the library provider so that they could fix it in future versions. He
documented this work thoroughly so that when a related issue appeared (due to a new issue
introduced by a later revision of the 3rd
party code), he was able to quickly identify and resolve
that as well. His thoroughness in execution improved his work output and likely improved the
software used by thousands of other engineers.
I can recommend Advitya wholeheartedly and without reservations. If you are lucky enough to
recruit him, you will be very happy to have him on your team.
Thank you,
Doug Carlson
doug.carlson@hillcrestlabs.com
703-314-5030 (c)